Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday October 13, 2010 @10:11AM
from the catch-me-if-you-can dept.

Julie188 writes "Researchers from Microsoft and the University of Massachusetts have been working on a technology that would let mobile phones and other 3G devices automatically switch to public WiFi even while the device is traveling in a vehicle. The technology is dubbed Wiffler and earlier this year its creators took it for a test drive with some interesting results. Although the researchers determined that a reliable public WiFi hotspot would be available to their test vehicles only 11% of the time, the Wiffler protocol was able to offload almost 50% of the data from 3G to WiFi."

Wireless vs wired has almost no bearing on whether or not you can use up a 250 GB bandwidth limit. The bandwidth available to wifi is typically much higher than the internet bandwidth itself.

Assuming 30 days in a month that 250GB limit would be reached with a consistent throughput of just over 100 KBps. If you can't push that over your wireless connection then you have something seriously wrong in your network setup.

Here's [mit.edu] a paper written by a fellow who's now a professor at U of I, Chicago which relates to the topic. The gist is that taxi's in a city were equipped with wifi and opportunistically connected to open access points as they traveled. The article won't revolutionize anything but it's certainly an interesting read and something worthy of building upon. One of the interesting parts is that the taxi-side wifi used a custom written utility to accelerate establishing a connection which didn't bother negotiating transmission speed but rather used a fixed 11Mbps as this was determined to be optimal for the setting.